The morning after the binders had been slammed on, all was quiet at Foothills Park. Everybody’d gone home. All the friends, the supporters.

Yet his face was still everywhere. Larger than life. On advertisements heralding the just-completed 2012 Canadian track and field championships, the Olympic trials for London. Hanging on fences, taped to the sides of the grandstand, flapping gently in a soft wind.

A mocking reminder of the gutting events of the night before.

“Yeah,” says Sam Effah now, “that was kind of surreal.”

A year later, the posters are all gone. The next Summer Olympic Games, in Brazil, are three years away. And Sam Effah, a change in mindset and in guidance, is back at Foothills, working out.

Yeah,” grumbles his new coach, Les Gramantik, scrolling back a year, “those damn posters. Poster Child for the 2012 trials. You saw his face all over the bloody stadium. He must’ve known he was kind of in trouble, right?

“If the trials had been somewhere else, it would’ve been like ‘Screw it, I’m walking. I’m not going to be able to to it.’ But he obviously didn’t want to let anybody down.

“He lost his carding as a result of that. There are no guaranteed contracts in track and field.”

In the wake of a glacial 10:39 clocking in last summer’s 100-metre final at nationals, far off the 10.18 Olympic qualifying standard and 21/100ths of a second behind Markham, Ont.’s Justin Warner, Canada’s new sprint champ, Sam Effah was left little choice but to step back, take a deep breath and re-boot.

The lickety-split 10.06 the Calgarian had run in Miramar, Fla., in 2010 heralding a blazing new talent, a logical successor to Bailey and Surin, seemed but a distant, wistful memory.

Having dealt with a series of injuries, including a quad strain that shut down his training for those 2012 trials, and facing the realization that all the buildup, the work, the London aspirations had vanished in a flash, in under 11 seconds, he’d reached a competitive crossroads.

“No, I never thought about retirement,” Effah says today, “but I did need time to think. Just to re-evaluate myself, my direction. I definitely identify myself as a track athlete. That day . . . it shattered my immediate goal, my immediate dream, but it didn’t shatter my desire or my ambitions.”

What he needed was a major overhaul in self-belief. The shift from longtime coach Brenda van Tighem to Gramantik was by accounts an amicable one. It wasn’t so much what Effah was doing wrong, just that he needed to do something different.

“His confidence,” says Gramantik, “was lower than a frog’s ass in the mud. Just low, low, low. That’s what we really had to kind of build up again. He had to start believing in his body. Once he believes in his body, he can run hard and not feel that there’s something twitching or hurting.

“Athletes have issues at different levels with confidence and once it’s gone, it’s really a process to get it back up.”

The first signs of a rebirth are there. Effah ran a 10.14, his second-ever fastest 100, in California this spring. Which he chalks up to Gramantik’s training and nutritional schedules.

“Brenda’s a great coach. We had a ton of success together. Les is a great coach, too. Very experienced. I think for sure I’ve got a different attitude, a different mindset. Now I take things more day-by-day. I still have those big goals but slowly build towards those. Ideally, you say ‘I want to go to the next Olympics’ but to get there you’ve got to put in a good next practice, and the practice after that. Building blocks. Crush every workout. And then when you get to that big event, there are no surprises because you know deep in your heart that you’re supposed to be there.

“I’ve always been a confident person. And I’m not saying that confidence was broken, but I’m definitely making things more realistic inside certain time periods.”

Ahead lies the Edmonton International Track Classic at the end of the month, the Summer Universiade in Kazan, Russia, nationals and the World Championships in Moscow.

“I have to re-establish myself at nationals. That’s first and foremost. Next year we have Commonwealth Games. Then hopefully Pan American Games in Toronto in 2015. And then once I establish myself at these international events, hopefully everything will fall into place for Brazil.”

So far, Gramantik has been cautiously pleased by the progress. The focus has been on training, the process, rather than the actual races. Start small, narrow, and then broaden the horizons.

That 10.14 in California is only an indication, Effah hopes, of what’s ahead.

“He’s been training well, running well,” praises Gramantik. “His primary objective has been to stay healthy. The past two years he’s had problems, on and off. We’ve tried to minimize that and fortunately he’s had no issues whatsoever since we started.

“It’s an interesting challenge for me. I’ve worked with a lot of athletes but this is really the only guy that’s really a pure sprinter.”

The posters are all gone. The reimagining has begun in earnest.

“The appetite to run, to run fast, is still there,” Sam Effah vows. “If anything, I’m hungrier than ever. Those who bounce back are those who are successful.

“I like the attention. It was a great feeling for people at last year’s nationals who’d always supported me to see what I’d grown to be. I was always kind of a shy, quiet kid in school who grew up to be that guy who was on all those posters. I was proud of those posters.

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